It is very important that you keep your hens in a secure pen, where they are out of the way of foxes , dogs , and any other predators which are seeking a potentially easy meal.

How do you keep them safe ? Easy, have a well fenced area be careful though if your fence is not high enough your chickens will simply climb, fly and jump over. You may consider placing a gate into the pen, to make it an easy and quick trip to the chicken pen, without having to hoist a leg up over a fence.

A big thank you to the staff at Hens for Pets in Nottinghamshire. We can thoroughly recommend this shop for anyone considering keeping hens. They have a great stock of chickens, hatching eggs and feeds, they also supply incubators and brooders.

The staff are very knowledgable and freindly, being chicken enthusiasts themselves they give very good advice, especially to first time owners.

Its easy to find being just by the nottingham IKEA and is located in a modern retail park with plenty of parking. Well worth a visit. If you want hatching eggs it is worth phoning the day before or earlier to see what is available.

23rd of March and we have aquired 9 golden cochin large fowl eggs from some great looking stock in lincolnshire.

Cochin eggs are not that big considering the size of the birds, and the fertility may not be as good as smaller more agile breeds, despite there being 2 cocks in with the 4 hens which supplied the eggs. It will be interesting to see what the hatch rate from these eggs is. We have them in in Hovobator with an automatic turning tray.

When you feed your chickens you have too make sure you dont put too much food down. Because i’ve noticed most chickens are really fussy about what they eat they eat the bits they like and leave the rest, which is most of the food and this food attracts mice and rats and all sorts of rodents witch will steal all the left over food. So when you come back there’s no food left so you put more food down because you think, they must be hungry and have eaten all the food. So you put more down so you end up waisting loads and loads of food which really a great deal of money your waisting over time.

As well as food there’s water, always make sure your chickens have clear fresh water.

Chickens absolutely love compost. They love digging around collecting big fat juicy worms to scoff. It’s amazing watching them slurp up these humungous worms swallowing them whole. While doing this they are turning the compost, so you end up with lovely compost after a few weeks and you can start to grow your own plants. Our chickens spend most of there day there, even when we let them out into the whole garden. You always see one of my chickens scratching around there in the day. It’s a beautiful sight to behold.

I have 6 chickens. They are all pekin bantams and they are all different, I have a white sussex bantam hen, right now she has gone broody so she dosen’t lay any eggs . She was not happy having this picture taken she looks very fat in this photo but when they sit in the nest box all day there feathers plump up and some of it is probably fat for being lazy.